For many products and/or services a customer or subscriber desires that a financial charge for the product/service be satisfied or paid from one or more of accounts, e.g., asset accounts owned by the customer or authorized for the customer's use. The debiting of the appropriate accounts, or reserving of assets in the appropriate accounts, is generally handled by a charging system.
Examples of online charging systems (OCS) and various techniques for use therewith are described in one or more of the following, all of which are incorporated herein by reference entirely:
(1) U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/258,990, entitled “REAL-TIME FLEXIBLE ACCOUNT SELECTION FOR COMMUNICATIONS”;
(2) U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/464,397, entitled “PRODUCT-CENTRIC CHARGING SYSTEM AND METHOD”;
(3) U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/538,000, entitled “TERMINAL-INITIATED OVERRIDE OF CHARGING SYSTEM RULES”;
(4) U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/538,340, entitled “TELECOMMUNICATIONS CHARGING WITH EXTERNALLY-CONTROLLED ACCOUNT SELECTION”;
(5) U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/896,417, entitled “CHARGING SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS”;
A charging system generally determines or computes an amount to be debited or deducted from a customer account for use of one or more services. The customer account may be either a prepaid account or a postpaid account. The amount of the debit or deduction depends, at least in part, on a cost or tariff associated with the service at the particular time of use of the service. As used herein, “tariff” means the cost, either per access or per unit of resource (e.g., time or bandwidth), or rate or fee assessed for use of a telecommunications service.
The tariff for a service may depend on several factors, such as location of the customer. Moreover, the tariff for a telecommunications service likely changes from time to time, and may even change quite rapidly (e.g., at hourly increments). A charging system is typically notified or programmed in advance that a tariff change is to occur. For example, the charging system may be notified that a planned implementation time Tx the tariff for customers of a certain service is to change from tariff R to tariff R′. When the internal clock of the charging system reaches time Tx, the tariff for the affected customers changes from tariff R to tariff R′. Thereafter, the affected customers are charged for use of the service in accordance with the tariff R′.
For some services the tariff, or change in tariff, is pre-announced to customers or users via a notification message. Moreover, in some instances and for some services, the customers may be able to contact an operator, service provider, or agent for the operator or service provider, and inquire of the applicable tariff prior to actual usage by the customer of the service. This enables the customer to be better informed regarding the anticipated cost of the service before actual usage. For example, a customer or subscriber may be able to send an inquiry using the customer's mobile device (e.g., mobile terminal or user equipment or cell phone) to ascertain a quote for the applicable tariff for access to the service. Upon receipt of the tariff information to the customer's mobile device, the customer may intelligently determine whether the use of the quoted tariff is consistent with the customer's budget and preferences before using the service.
An example implementation of the foregoing has been termed “Yield Optimization”. Yield Optimization means that a subscriber may obtain dynamic pricing on used service. The used service may be, e.g., making a phone call, sending a short message service text (SMS), or downloading a movie, for examples. A Yield Optimization discount may be related to factors such as location and time. Before using a service the customer may check the discount and see if the amount/level of the discount, and thus the current resulting tariff, is appealing or not.
For customers or subscribers having mobile terminals or the like, the notification of a tariff, e.g., of a tariff change such as the change from tariff R to tariff R′, may take considerable time and thus notifications or inquiry responses regarding the tariff change may reach the customer considerably after the planned implementation time T. The tariff notifications may involve delivery of notifications to thousands or even ten thousands of cells. The tariff notifications are typically delivered to nodes (e.g., base station controllers or radio network controllers) of a radio access network that control radio base stations that serve the cells, or in some network such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) to the very base stations themselves. The nodes responsible for the served cells may then “broadcast” or otherwise make available the tariff notifications to the wireless terminals (e.g., cell phones, user equipments, mobile devices) that are served by the nodes.
The telecommunications and other signaling associated with such notification may require many minutes, even tens of minutes, to reach the base stations handling more lately notified cells. In general, a mean value for a broadcast distribution latency value would be between ˜0.5 seconds and ˜1.5 seconds, depending on the base station type. The speed of the broadcast delivery also depends on the number of threads for the provisioning. Several broadcast jobs could be executed simultaneously. Nevertheless, the last broadcasted message could be many minutes delayed.
In a lately notified cell a customer making access to the affected service may be caught in a time gap after the planned implementation time Tx but before notification of the tariff change, which may result in the customer accessing the service with inaccurate tariff information. This situation may not be acceptable to the customer or desirable from the standpoint of customer relations, particularly if the change from tariff R to tariff R′ happened to be an increase.
Thus, it should be understood that a broadcasted message carrying a tariff notification may show an old discount or tariff (e.g., previous hour value) that is not valid any longer. But in the rating logic of the charging system the new discount or new tariff already has already been loaded and will be used in the rating of the selected service at and after the planned implementation time Tx regardless of the gap between the planned implementation time and the notification. So, a mismatch in time could occur between the new discount or new tariff for the rating logic and the broadcasted discount or tariff stored in the node or server (e.g., the base station) that is consulted by the customer. Whether the gap turns out to be detrimental or not may depend on how soon the cell serving the customer is provided with the updated notification regarding the new tariff R′. The less fortunate customers are those in cells which, due to location or other factor, may be late or even last cells to be updated, and thus the tariff change may be broadcasted too late and thus provided with incorrect tariff information.
FIG. 1 shows an example situation or scenario in which a tariff notification has been sent to approximately ten thousand cells. The x-axis indicates the time, between 11:00 and 12:00. The y-axis indicates the number of cells. Each cell is represented as a line (latency time) with a starting and an end time. All cells are sorted according to its start time. The first few cells are provisioned with the tariff notification close to 11 o'clock. However, the last cells are provisioned with the tariff notification at 11:21. FIG. 1 thus demonstrates that in the illustrated scenario a possible mismatch or gap in time of about twenty one minutes may exist for a broadcast message which provisions or provides tariff information.